


Dreams

by ashesandhoney



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Mating Bond, Scenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-08-11 14:51:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7896889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU which Feyre experiences the same effects of the mating bond that Rhys does. </p><p>"Now? I thought you were enjoying your freedom," I said and tilted her hand towards us so that the ring she'd slid on the outside of the silk gloves was clearly visible. She twisted her hand without actually pulling away from me so that the ring was out of her view and I almost faltered in the dance as I realized what she had meant. She hadn’t asked the question out of fear, at least not entirely. I let my voice soften when I said, "Is that a request, Feyre?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Gathering

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of premises this AU is built on:
> 
> Rhys either works harder at shielding against the bond or is just more capable of it.  
> Feyre experiences the mating bond the same way that Rhys does.  
> Feyre's powers come on a lot faster and a lot stronger than they did in canon.  
> That line from the book where Rhys says that if he doesn't use his magic, it will eventually drive him insane is very important.  
> I also made up the Gathering but that's not really a premise, it's just an excuse to have a dancing scene.

I sat with my knee up on the arm of the chair and watched the crowd mince around each other. I hadn't been in a room this tense since Amarantha died but tradition was tradition and the Courts were holding to it because after fifty years underground, maybe we all needed a little bit of tradition to lean on. The Gathering was usually held once a decade and someone had done the math and realized that this year was due for one. 

So we had delegations from all seven courts in the same space for the first time since Under the Mountain. It was an outdoor party with strung lanterns and floating balls of sunlight beneath a darkening sky. It was a beautiful party if nothing else. The wide dance floor was made of dark wood that shone beneath a globe of captured sunrise but it was still empty. A banquet had been laid out along one side covered in food that no one was going to eat just as no one could bring themselves to drink the wine. 

The Dawn Court had done an admirable job of pretending that they wanted to hold a giant party on their lands barely six months after Amarantha's defeat, barely six months after they had started rebuilding. 

I would have refused. 

No. I wouldn’t have needed to refuse. 

I could have offered them the Hewn City as the party site and they all would have refused to come because it meant going under another mountain which was as good as refusing. 

I scanned the crowd. Day and Autumn hadn't arrived yet, neither had Spring but I was trying not to think too hard about that. I caught Amren's eye from across the dance floor. She stood along the fringes with a goblet in her hand that was probably full of wine that she was only pretending to drink from. Probably. She narrowed her eyes at me and I flashed her a smile that had as much venom in it as that glare. 

“I have to be here, you volunteered for this,” that look reminded her. 

I had wanted to just bring a few of the Court of Nightmares and put on a show of being particularly horrible for a few hours but the last time I'd gone to a party by myself hadn't gone well. They had refused to allow me out the door on my own this time. 

Amren was here because bringing Azriel would have looked like I was here to spy and bringing Cassian would have sent a different message to the southern warmongers that I also didn't want. The other option was Mor but Amren looked scarier. So I got to spend a night in a room where my only friend was a pissy ancient creature in a very pretty body who might have been slaughtering little animals under tables for something to eat. 

I rolled my shoulders and located my Courtiers circling. One of them had cornered the new High Lord of Summer and I slid off the chair to go and stop that conversation before it could start. Tarquin was one of the few High Lords who seemed to see any value in peaceful negotiation. I didn't need Lorrick to ruin any chances of an alliance before I'd even had a chance to be properly introduced to the man. 

That was why I didn't see them enter the room. I was busy walking the line between the monster Lorrick knew me to be and the potential friend I wanted Tarquin to see me as. Some days it felt like it would be easier to just become a recluse. The Night Court territory was large enough to survive without trade. We could do away with diplomacy and politics. We could just close our borders and let the rest of Prythian burn. 

Except I wasn't going to suggest that.

I caught sight of Tamlin as I turned back around. My goal had bee to return to lazing in my chair and counting down the hours until I didn't have to be there any more. 

The Spring Court was a knot around Tamlin. Lucian was standing in his shadow because Lucian was always standing in his shadow. He was keeping all his people close. I almost didn't see her but she was there, just behind him, wearing a gown in the pinks and yellows of sunrise and long gloves. Thin. She hadn't been that thin when she'd been living in a cell under the mountain. 

Don't. 

Except I was already moving before my mind could send out that warning.  

"Such a lovely party, it's always nice to honour the old traditions, isn't it?" I said as I came to stop in front of them. 

I had worn all black and a part of me wanted to flare out the wings just to complete the look but here I was a High Lord and needed to be High Fae through and through. Tamlin and his little retinue in their cream and gold and little floral touches were the picture of goodness and I was not. I made sure my smile matched the rest of my outfit. If I was going to play the villain, I was going to play it well. 

"I'm surprised they invited you," Tamlin said and he managed it in an admirably flat tone. I wondered how much it would take to make his temper crack, probably not much.   

"Traditions are like that, all the High Lords means all the High Lords," I said. 

I met Feyre's eye. 

I wasn't really here to play verbal games with Tamlin and didn't care if they knew it. I suspected Lorrick of being related to mountain trolls somewhere in his lineage and even he was more stimulating conversation. Feyre held my gaze with wide eyes but didn't say anything. I hadn't realized how much I missed her until she was standing there. Here was the person I wanted more than air and couldn't have. I had spent six months convincing myself that she was far better off without me. 

She didn't look better off unless the point of comparison was her worst moments of the fever under the mountain. Too thin, too uncomfortable, too unhappy and not just about having me leering at her. Pretty dress, fancy hair but there was something in her eyes that made me tense. A little trill of anger or defensiveness that I couldn't quite place. 

"Traditions are a little like a well made bargain, inescapable but not always unpleasant," I said and flashed her a smile and then walked away. A stupid conversation. I was needling things that I should not have been needling. I caught Amren's eyes again but she wasn't glaring now. Her chin was tilted as she swirled her cup and watched the Spring Court with a considering look on her face. 

Fuck. 

That was going to be an excellent conversation to have later. 

I felt a little tendril of power from Tamlin before he clamped down on his temper. I almost let mine slip its leash as well but Amren's expression had distracted me. She didn't look at me or give me any clue as to what she was thinking. I left the Spring Court to enjoy the party and dropped back down into my chair and played with the stem of an empty wine glass. I wasn't the only one not drinking but I was one of the few who wasn't even bothering to pretend. 

I didn't look at Feyre or Tamlin or anyone else.

I let my shields against the bond slip a little bit. I had built them up and up and up until they almost kept her all the way out even without shielding on her side. I had blocked out her nightmares and her grief and trusted that keeping out of her life would be an improvement. She didn’t need me lurking at the fringes of her mind and pulling her down with my own nightmares. 

Now, I let myself be aware of her but there was very little there. Maybe she was shielding. Good. Tamlin wasn't as dumb as I thought he was if he was making sure she was getting lessons. 

"Will the High Lord be dancing?" someone interrupted my thoughts some indeterminate amount of time later. Not the end of the party yet was the only measure of time that I really cared about. 

There had been a speech about the honour and unity of the Courts and the future of Prythian that sounded exactly like the speech that had been given at the last one of these stupid parties I had attended before Amarantha. I tilted my head up to see Tamira standing over me. She was here with her father and I'd let her slip into the delegation because I hadn't really cared about who came from the Court of Nightmares as long as they were capable of not utterly embarrassing the Night Court. 

I glanced past her at her father who was sitting at a lower table along the edge of the dance floor and he pretended he hadn't been watching. It had been 300 years since anyone had made this particular bid for power. Tamira probably hadn't been born the last time someone tried to convince me to marry their daughter and elevate the family name. 

I was stalling in hopes she would give up out of fear before I had to say anything. Once I started dancing, I would have to dance with other people and glaring from a distance was so much more pleasant. Tamira didn't waver. Her brown hair was twisted up in a pile of curls and she had worn a purple dress that showed off more than it covered. 

And she was almost palpably afraid of me. I let my powers loose enough to get that much but she seemed to be more afraid of her father. She smiled as I stood but it was a forced thing. There was sometimes a certain joy in being the most terrifying thing in the room. Other times it was just exhausting. 

I did not want to dance but I also didn't want to have to send her back to her horrible family having utterly failed. She was going to fail if her ultimate goal was to convince me to marry her but at least she would be able to say she had given it her best shot. She attempted conversation as we turned around the dance floor. I made sure nothing I did was encouraging and her discomfort got worse the longer the song dragged on. 

When the song ended my hopes of sneaking back to my brooding were immediately ruined. The dance floor shifted into something organized and partnered that I knew the steps to but wished I didn't.  Tamira stepped into position and getting out of it would now require being noticeable. It would be a slight. A minor one and no one thought better of me but somewhere out of the depth of my memories my mother's voice chided me.

I let myself become part of the pattern. I smiled and while I wasn't exactly friendly, I  also wasn't exactly unfriendly as the dance swirled around. The courts had largely come dressed to colour schemes and most of them had chosen light and bright colours in honour of the hosts. Beige and cream, soft greens and blues, even the Autumn court had come in a fawn colour. I was probably as easy to pick out as the wolf among the sheep in the unrelenting black. Even my court hadn't dressed to match. I stood out. Which had been the intention, I could have worn blue or gray or pink if I'd wanted but I had wanted to be the wolf among the pretty flowers. 

Still as the dance twirled new people through the pattern and into my arms, I felt almost guilty for it. I scared people and while that had kept me and the people who mattered to me alive, it was a little unsettling to see the same look repeated. Each one met my eye like they were going to refuse to continue the pattern and try and skip me altogether. 

The dance brought me Feyre just before the music was set to run out. She had looked thin from a distance but as I looked down at her, I could feel her spine under my hand through the fabric of the dress. She tilted her chin up and that she was shorter than I was was not a surprise but she looked small and that was. She had never looked small. This did not look like the same woman who had flung a bone spear at Amarantha's head only a few months before. 

"Hello, Feyre," I said. 

I was leading the steps and she let me push her through them. Her attention strayed from my face and she looked over her shoulder and then back. Her eyes were wide as saucers and her mouth had fallen open a little in shock or surprise before she snapped it shut and closed down her expression. 

"Is our bargain still there? I can't feel it anymore," she said. 

"I have not felt the need to call it in but yes, it is still there," I said. 

"Would you?" she asked. 

"Now? I thought you were enjoying your freedom," I said and tilted her hand towards us so that the ring she'd slid on the outside of the silk gloves was clearly visible. She twisted her hand without actually pulling away from me so that the ring was out of her view and I almost faltered in the dance as I realized what she had meant. 

She hadn’t asked the question out of fear, at least not entirely. I let my voice soften when I said, "Is that a request, Feyre?" 

She was tense and scared. We'd lost the steps of the dance and I pulled her out of the pattern. Tamlin would notice that in about twenty seconds but she was scared. Of me, yes, but she was also scared of something else but I couldn't figure it out without pushing right into her mind and that was a violation that I wasn't willing to subject her to. Her terror when I had done it that day in the Spring Court so long ago still crawled up my spine sometimes and left me drowning in nausea. 

"Yes," she said. 

Without further explanation, she pulled away from me and headed Tamlin off before he could make it to where we stood on the edge of the dance floor. She took him by the hand and tucked herself in at his side and let him guide her away with his arm wrapped around her shoulder like he was protecting her. Cream and sunset golds and a wreath of flowers in her hair that matched the one in his jacket. A beautifully matched pair but I could still feel the anxiety through the fog of her imperfect shields. I stared after her with my thoughts in tatters. 

I needed out of the dancing before tradition and the chains of polite behaviour pulled me back in. 

I went to lean against the wall beside Amren. 

I had avoided this. Either one of us set people on edge, when we stood together people made a wide berth around us and sometimes stare in panic. Just a pair of monsters. I was on edge after the conversation with Feyre and sinking into being a monster was like putting on a comfortable mask. 

Amren tapped against my mental shields and I pushed the chaos down off the surface and opened a channel to the strange landscape that was Amren's mind. Minds were similar, there were touches of personality but it was like a bedroom in that there were things to expect. A bed, a place to store clothing, someplace to dress. Amren's mind was a dense forest and subterranean caves, not like anyone else. She was something utterly different and I didn't really like being this close to it if I could avoid it. I hid that thought as I opened the channel. 

"The Spring Court girl, she's the one from Under the Mountain," Amren into that space between our minds and her voice didn't sound like her speaking voice either. Heavier, darker, something that went beyond sound. Instinct reminded me she was something else. Powerful and other. 

I nodded. 

"I want to talk to her, call her bargain in," Amren said. 

"Are you giving me an order, Amren?" 

"When you were twelve, your father brought you to me because in spite of all the training his advisers could offer you, you were starting to slip. You would sit on the floor and laugh or sob and then hop back up and go back to combat training for fifteen hours in a row until you collapsed and had to dragged home."

"And worse things, I remember."

"She is slipping and slipping faster than you did." 

"Since when are you charitable with your time or your training?"

"She is your mate, I can smell it even if the rest of this rabble cannot. I would offer it on your behalf but she is one thing reborn into the body of another. We are few and far between and she is dying." 

I looked at Amren but she didn't look back. She was staring out at the crowd. Individuals in the crowd looked back at us and I clamped my dampers back down on my power. I had let it slip when she had said the word 'dying' and the pair of us were definitely the most terrifying thing in the room now. Amren who was quiet and considering but so very not one of them no matter what her appearance might say otherwise. Me with my power leaking and a look like thunder on my face. 

"Dying." 

"Do it, Rhysand. She cannot have more than a few months before she is lost entirely and when she is lost, she will let all that power go and we may not have a Prythian to defend against Hybern once the storm is over." 

I looked back at Feyre and her attention immediately jumped away from me. She sat beside Ianthe of all people and the priestess was holding her hand and talking in her ear. Lucian was still watching us. I tried to imagine what those people would do if Feyre slipped. 

Amren’s warning rattled in my thoughts. 

Slipped made it sound like an accident or a little passing thing. 

I had slipped twice. 

I had tried to control the power by ignoring it and only using as much as my teachers expected me to have. I did it for years before I started training with Amren. My moments of manic energy were not the worst part. The first time my control had slipped, I had blotted out the sun for three days. The second time I had turned nineteen people into slack jawed empty shells. 

In both cases, I had been a child. Feyre had been reborn into a body fully formed. Her powers would be manifesting not developing and whatever slipped from her would be the full power of her adult body. Maybe Amren’s fear that she could cripple Prythian wasn’t completely unfounded. It sounded absurd. None of us had that kind of power but then, none of us carried the power of seven courts. 

I tightened my power dampers and left Amren to lurk in the shadows while I went back to lounging until the last few hours of the event had drained away. I did not watch Feyre but I kept my shields against the bond as low as I could safely tolerate them and let myself wallow in the presence of her even if her imperfect fogged shield kept the details back. 

She knew she was in trouble and she had come to me for help. She had asked me and that meant more to me than maybe it should have.


	2. The Hurricane

I waited until I was home and alone and had taken a long enough bath to wash the filth of being the High Lord of Nightmares off of my skin if not my soul before I reached for her. I lay on my back with my wings spread out and the house in Velaris smelling of home. A window was cracked open so I could hear the sound of the city: alive and awake and enjoying the night. This was as close to stable as I was going to get with Amren's strange mental voice in my head saying the word 'dying' and I hoped it would be enough. 

I slid my power out along the bond until I found the fog that stood between me and her. I could have cut through it easily enough but instead I just leaned on the boundary, nudging my power against hers and waiting. She was sleep and I was waking her up from inside her head which was going to be a strange feeling for her so I was trying to be as gentle as possible. 

I felt her stir. The spark of life in the haze as her mind woke up. I smiled, relieved to be able to feel her so close.

"Hello, Feyre darling." 

She panicked a little. I couldn't tell what her body was doing without pushing in deeper and I wasn't going to do that but I could imagine her sitting up and trying to find me in the dark. I slipped back a little farther from her shields so it wouldn't feel quite so much like crowding now that she was awake. 

"Just a voice. I'm not there. I thought perhaps we might make some arrangements before I came barging into your bedroom." 

Confusion and curiosity and a little bit of push back against my power at the edge of her mind but no words. 

"Think of the bond as a bridge. I've walked along that bridge from my mind to yours and now I'm standing outside your door. Just think the words at me, I'll be able to hear them." 

The confusion got stronger and there was a touch of fear in it. I couldn't step back farther without losing the contact but I tried to push down my power so hopefully I wouldn't feel as loud on her doorstep. 

"Rhysand," came clearly out of the jumble. 

"Yes, as you're planning on being my house guest for the next week, I wanted to know when I should expect you." 

More confusion behind the haze of the fog and a desire grew to cut down those shields so I could feel her clearly. Then a rush, not words but images and impressions. Stone and cold and that smell of damp places and it resolved into the cell she had been trapped in under the mountain and my own aversion to that image was almost as strong as hers. 

"House guest, Feyre, as in guest in my house."

I sent back my own collection of images and impressions slowly and calmly. One by one, image by image I sent her the palace over the Hewn City. I sent her the view of the mountains through draperies and the little breakfast table from a memory that I forgot to erase Mor and Azriel from so she got the image of Mor rolling her eyes at him while he smiled crookedly at his plate as well. The scent of jasmine. The swinging lanterns. The moon rise over the mountain range. 

Her fear edged away with each image. I kept sliding the memories towards her until she had calmed then a few more because it felt like we were sharing something.

"Guest, not prisoner. The only unpleasant surprise is that Amren wants to meet you but she's-" I paused and tried to find a word that was both reassuring and not a lie. Neither kind nor harmless was in the least true, "She is curious about you and doesn't wish you any harm." 

“When?” she asked. 

“After breakfast? Tomorrow evening? Next Tuesday? I can work with your schedule,” I said as though we were planning a dinner party. 

There was another flurry of confusion, or maybe it was indecision, on the other side of the fog. She both wanted this and didn’t and that was curious all on its own. 

"Tomorrow?" she said. 

"I'll have them make sure that breakfast is waiting for us then. I'll see you in the morning," I said. 

Relief, fear, a reflected image of the breakfast table I had shown her with Mor and Azriel sitting at it. I did something I had never indulged myself in before, not under the mountain, not during those early months when she'd been plagued with nightmares, not since I built the shields so thick I couldn't hear even that. I sent her a wash of comfort and safety and then before I could let myself fall into that sensation, I retreated back behind my shields. 

* * *

 

I winnowed into the Spring Court and appeared just behind the guards posted at the entrance. I looked up the wide lawn and circular drive and let my power clap down in my wake enough to make them jump. They spun on me but I was already walking towards the door. Showing up at the breakfast table over Tamlin's shoulder had its appeal but I had decided on the slightly more dignified approach. 

I had been invited and guests should use the front door. 

I turned the guards back around into their places with a thought and cut across the grass to the arched entrance way. The door opened and a servant looked up at me with terrified eyes. I stepped inside and waited for him to alert someone. Or perhaps he had just gone off to find someplace to hide. The last time I had visited hadn't been pleasant. I picked a flower out of the arrangement on the table in the foyer and leaned against a pillar and waited. 

"Get the hell out, you're like a idiot hunting dog, you forget you want something until you see it again," Lucian said. "Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of and leave the rest of us alone." 

He had appeared down the hallway to my left and I turned my head to look at him. For all that Feyre had looked too thin and too pale, he looked better than he had in years. I hated him a little bit for that comparison. He had risked himself for her Under the Mountain but now that everything was comfortable and easy for him again, he had ignored her. 

"I need to speak to the Lady of the House," I said. 

"No, you don't, get out," Lucian said. 

He didn't actually enter the room with me. He stood in the hallway as though there we extra few feet would do him any good if I decided to hurt him. I let my power out of its hold enough to remind him that there was a good reason for him to be afraid of me. It swirled around me as I stalked towards him. He held his ground. Lucian always surprised me a little with his moments of bravery but it wasn't worth slowing for. I stepped around him and kept going. 

This place was a gilded cage.

I could feel it in the walls, something about the way the warding and the shields  had been built was as much to keep things in as it was to keep things out. Or maybe I was stealing that impression from Feyre. I hadn't put the shields back up all the way, not between us. The bond was a weak link in my defenses but it was worth it. I pushed a little bit of power down to her fogged side of the bond and tapped. 

A knock. 

She was already looking up when I came through the door into a dining room. She wore a green dress and long gloves again. A territorial instinct that I didn't have any right to entertain twisted in my chest at the sight of the gloves. 

Cover it up, hide it away. She had made that bargain to save their lives. Regardless of the terms or the details, she had done it to save their lives and now they all hid it away like it was something to be ashamed of. 

"Who-" Tamlin started. 

Lucian was behind me. He had been arguing with me as I had followed the scent of her through the halls to get me here. Well, he had been talking at me, trying to reason me into turning around. The sunlight streamed through the windows and everything smelled of spring grass and sweet tea. Ianthe had joined them for breakfast and the look on her face as she realized it was me was worth the trip all on its own. I flashed her a grin and she jerked back from the table enough to give me a little flash of satisfaction. Then I put all my attention on Feyre. 

"Feyre, darling, we have somewhere to be," I said. 

"She is not going anywhere with you," Tamlin said. 

I could have argued with him. I could have traded threats and we could have postured at one another but the walk through the halls with just the echoes of Feyre's feelings about this place weighing me down was enough to make me want to be anywhere else. I didn't sidestep him. I just winnowed from where I stood to the place beside her. She was standing. She had stood when Tamlin did but she hadn't looked away from me. 

I held out a hand and she glanced across the table. I reached out and took hers instead of waiting for her. She tightened her fingers on mine and that was enough answer. I paused and peeled off the glove on her unmarked hand first and dropped the silken fabric onto the table. Underneath she wore the wedding ring and a wide silver bracelet. Then I peeled the other glove off as well and dropped it down so that when I rejoined our hands, the tattoo was in full view. 

"We'll talk in a week," I said to no one in particular.

Lucian's lip curled and Ianthe looked at me like I had threatened to cut out her heart. I didn't bother looking at Tamlin. If I did, I would let my anger crest and that would have been a very bad thing. How had he failed to notice that her misery was soaking into the very walls of this house? Before I could let myself ask that question, I winnowed us away to the little breakfast table, I had shown her the night before. 

"Oh," she said on a slow exhale. 

She stood close to me and I waited for her to pull away but when she twisted to look down the hall, she did it without stepping back. I was staring and waiting and loathe to be the one to move first. She turned back to me and was still so close that I was a little lost as to what to say. I raised my eyebrows at her and she took a deep breath but still didn't step away.

Scent.

She was breathing in my scent like she had been suffocating without it. I had been doing the same thing but I had been hiding it better. 

"Oh," I said, "That's why you asked for this?" 

She stepped back then as though I'd broken a spell. Her eyes were suddenly anywhere but on me and she stumbled as she moved away. She spun so she was faced away from me, eyes on the view. Her hair had been pulled back from her face with combs so it fell in a cascade down her back. Golden brown, more gold than brown in the morning light. I pushed aside the details because I could have categorized them for hours and that was not what this moment needed. 

"When?" I asked.

No answer. 

"During the dance?" I asked. 

"Before that, when you looked at me when you were being a jackass to Tamlin," she said and her shoulders dropped as though she had let off a weight. "I hadn't been able to figure out why you looked at me like that after everything under the mountain but that was when you knew." 

"Yes," I said. 

Another long silence before she turned back to me but she said nothing. 

"Amren will be here in about a half hour, if you haven't eaten, you should," I said.

Neither of us said the words. 

I was her mate and she knew it but somehow it felt like too much to say aloud.  

A frown and then a flicker of relief as she realized I wasn't going to push the topic. She sat down and started picking at the food. I joined her, sitting across the table and watching what she chose. Not a particular fan of sweets but she liked fresh fruit. I wasn't paying attention to what I put on my own plate. They wouldn't serve anything horrendous and as long as I wasn't hungry, it didn't matter. 

"Who is Amren?" she asked. 

"The woman in gray from the party," I said. 

"Lucian said she's more dangerous than you are," she said. 

"She is. It's a different kind of power but she is certainly dangerous all on her own." 

"What is she curious about?"

"Your power." 

"My power is destructive." 

"That's the type of thing to make Amren curious. About the only thing she is more interested in than power is jewels. She is slightly concerned that your powers are strong enough that if left uncontrolled, they can do serious damage to all of Prythian." 

She inhaled and I looked up at her. The fog on the other end of the bond roiled like storm clouds in a wind but then it settled again and she said, "It's controlled." 

She held up a wrist and I reached across the table to touch the silver bracelet. It was inscribed with spell work I wasn't familiar with and it made my skin crawl a little. I didn't touch her skin. She held still as I turned it around so that I could look over the entire thing. Pretty enough to look like jewelry but she had been hiding it away below gloves as well. 

"They don't like to see any evidence that you aren't a china doll for them to dress up and set on stage to play perfect precious wife," I said. 

She snapped her arm back out of my grip and both hands disappeared under the table as her lips tightened. I couldn't tell what the emotion was. This close and with the shields down, I should have been able to tell if she was angry or guilty or lonely but it was all just that fog. I would not push into it but I was starting to understand what Amren had been able to sense in her.

The fog wasn't a poor shield. The fog was a haze of magic, like the smoke from a forest fire settling over the village until it choked the life out of every living thing. 

'Dying' Amren's mental voice rasped in my memory and I let myself catalogue her again. Too thin, too pale, too calm. Feyre wasn't calm. Feyre threw bone spears at tyrants and sobbed until she could barely breathe and stormed into underground citadels because she loved so deeply it hurt. Feyre was anger and love and defiance all wrapped up in a fragile mortal body. This person was a ghost of the woman I had met under the mountain. Anger rippled through me.

There was more than one way to die. 

"Controlled and suppressed are not the same thing. Those bangles are like trying to use a cork to fix an overflowing dam. They aren't going to last," I said. 

"The last time I took them off, I blew out every window in the manor," she said. 

"I don't have any windows," I said. 

I pushed back from the table and held out a hand to her.  I waited and she took my hand and let me pull her up to her feet. She was wary but nothing more. There wasn't any fear. I sent a mental message to the cook below to make sure that the servants were all at least three floors either above or below us. I walked Feyre out into the middle of the space like I was going to ask her to dance. The plan had been to wait for Amren but that soft almost empty expression when she had looked up at me was more than I could take. 

"It was fire once, before the bracelets, I called fire," she said. 

"So you burn the drapes, everything else is solid stone. The scorch marks will make for an interesting story to tell dinner guests," I said. 

"What if it's something worse?" 

"This power in you is nascent. You have been High Fae for barely six months. Your powers are still taking form. There is nothing you can call down that I can't stop." 

My confidence was unwavering. A smile, a careless shrug, a little wink.

I had no idea if it was true but better that she incinerate me than Amren. Amren could take it as an attack and she'd tear Feyre to bits on instinct before either of them realized what was happening. I was never quite sure how controlled the primeval thing inside Amren was. I wasn't sure how much of the person I knew was an act and how much of it was genuine but I'd seen her lash out at people before. 

"You're going to hold your hands out like this," I said lifting her hands by the damned bracelets, once again avoiding her skin. I held her steady, arms outstretched like she was at a fitting for a new suit, "Then I'm going to take the bracelets off for you," I put a finger on the clasps but didn't release them, not yet, "Then you're going to not just let the power go but push it out. Whatever it is that comes out of you, let it come. It will leave you with empty spaces inside you that will feel like gaping wounds. They aren't. The magic doesn't care about you. It is a wild animal and you need to tame it or it will eat you alive." 

Amren's words from centuries ago. I think I hated the beast inside me so much because it reminded me that every shred of power would rip me apart if I let it and the beast was just the most tangible evidence of it. I had been twelve years old when she had said that. Twelve years old and still reeling from the image of a room full of adult men ad women, some of the post powerful in the Night Court, all reduced to puppets. They had been examiners and teachers come to evaluate me for my father so he would know just how powerful I would grow to be. I had destroyed their minds without meaning to. 

Every person in that room except for her.

Amren had walked past the rest of them, they'd been sitting in a semi-circle around me and were now lolling and staring with vacant eyes. I hadn't even realized what I had done. She had walked up to me and said the same words I said to Feyre now. 

"If you suppress it, when it breaks through those defenses, it will do things you do not want. People will be hurt," I said. 

"I can't control it, not without the bracelets," she said. 

"Yes, you can. Not yet perhaps but no one is born with the ability to walk. So we start by pulling out every festering bit of power that is trying to make your body home and then we start to learn to stand and fight and make it bow to you," I said. 

She looked at me. Really looked. Not just her eyes trained on me but her attention too, as much attention as she could salvage from the fog wrapped around her mind. 

"I'm probably going to wreck your fancy palace," she said. 

I laughed, "I've got another one and once we're through with this one, you can wreck it too." 

She didn't laugh back but the corner of her lip twitched. 

"Ready?" I asked. 

"Now?"

"Yes, whatever the power comes out as, don't try and stop it." 

It was going to be a good show. I could feel it in her. The way you can hear a waterfall before you can see it. Whatever it was, fire or water or darkness, it was going to be impressive. She still stood with her arms outstretched and my hands were on her wrists. I waited until she looked up at me again and a moment later her attention sharpened through the fog. I felt it along the bond in the same moment I saw it in her eyes. She nodded and I snapped the cuffs open and let them hit the stone floor. 

Clang. 

And a second later. 

Clang. 

Then nothing. 

We stood frozen. We were close together. Close enough that when she bowed her head forward, her hair brushed my cheek.

Then the power built. The hair on the back of my neck stood up before it became anything. My body hummed just to be close to it. The moment before the storm was both too long and too short. Feyre let out a shuddering gasp and her head fell to my shoulder. 

Then the magic **became**.

It became wind and water.

Water pulled from the air itself that twisted into tendrils. Moments later those were smashed apart by a gust of wind that whipped her hair up around us and blew my own into my eyes. The water became driving rain as the wind howled through the hall.

A hurricane. She had made a hurricane. It pelted icy water at us. It tore at the drapes and made them snap and finally pull lose. It knocked over chairs. It unbalanced her and she was leaning against me to keep from falling. 

"Don't stop," I said. 

I didn't try to temper the awe in my voice. She was a force of nature. I watched as another curtain was ripped out of the wall, the rod clattered to the ground and the gauze whipped by over my head, tangling around a lantern and the wind pulled that down too. It shattered against the floor, coloured glass scattered across the wet floor. 

She was crying. I felt it along the bond first, the exhaustion and the emotional release that came with the outpouring of magic. It wasn't a single emotion. It was anger and fear and relief and pain and joy. It became tears and then a scream before she collapsed against me, breathing hard and shaking as the howling hurricane became a breeze carrying nothing but mist then it was over. 

I held her and sank down onto the floor.

The room was in tatters. The stone still stood, just as I promised her it would but the draperies and the lanterns, the chairs and the little sitting areas, all of it was upturned. Sopping papers stuck to the floor and I didn't even know where they had come from. A hurricane. A hurricane inside a girl but now it was over and she was wiping at the tears and trying to pull herself up to see for herself. 

She didn't pull away from me when I let her go, she just straightened and looked around. She reached for one of the bracelets. I grabbed her wrist, "Do not put that back on." 

"I can't do that again, I can't," she said. 

"It's over. It's over for now. We're going to spend this week figuring out how to control it. Not suppress it, not squash it down so Tamlin can pretend it isn't there, control it," I said. 

Annoyance flashed when I said Tamlin's name. Real annoyance and I grinned in response. She pushed off of my lap and tottered to her feet but didn't fall. She didn't reach for the bracelets either. 

"I need to change," she said. 

We were both sopping wet like we had been through a thunderstorm. I pushed my wet hair back from my face with both hands and said, "Amren's just going to make you do it again, may as well only ruin the one dress." 

"There isn't any magic left, that was everything," she said. 

"No, it wasn't everything," I said.

This is where the hard part started because it was going to hurt. I could remember it hurting. Amren drew the power out like it was a poison and the deeper it had settled, the more it hurt. When I had been small, the magic had settled into bones and muscle, into the deepest corners of my mind, into parts of me that were so deep, they didn't have names. Hopefully it wouldn't run that deep in Feyre since her powers had only been manifesting for a few months. I had been suppressing mine for about five years before Amren started trying to drag it out of me. 

I was explaining it to her when Amren herself appeared. She must have come up from the Hewn City or maybe Morrigan had winnowed her in but she turned a corner and walked into the hall, picking daintily around the puddles and destroyed decor. Watching her come towards us through the wreckage brought back the awe.

Feyre had done that. Torn this place to shreds with nothing more than the release of her power. The things she would be able to do when it was brought under control would be astronomical. 

Amren considered Feyre and to her credit, Feyre didn't look away from that gaze. 

"You will start slow," I said to Amren. 

"It does not work like that," she said. 

"I seem to recall passing out after hours." 

"No one had noticed how much you were holding back, it needed to be done before your power came to full strength." 

"I do not argue that but do not push her until she passes out. She isn't killing people." 

"No, I see she has limited it to property damage." 

Feyre looked at me with a flicker of fear. I hadn't mentioned the story of the room full of mindless staring eyes. Fear was a real emotion though so I took it as a good sign. Or maybe I was just too used to being feared and barely noticed it. I scooped up her bracelets and went to leave but Feyre caught my sleeve.

Afraid of me and not. All at once. I saw her inhale and wanted to pull her in so she could bury her face against my skin and I could do the same. I didn't do it and neither did she though for a brief crystalline moment, I imagined she might. 

"I haven't finished my breakfast yet," I said pointing at the little table which had been flipped by the wind. I flipped the table back over and replaced the cloth. New food was waiting in the kitchen and I flicked a finger to have it laid out. I took her bracelets with me when I went to go sit down. I wasn't going to get much eating done but I sat like it was the most peaceful little bistro in the world. 

I ate toast and half listened to Amren explain everything I had already said while Feyre tried to make sense of the otherworldliness of her. I didn't have to be able to read her thoughts to follow them. There was something off about Amren and Feyre couldn't quite make sense of it.

"Shall we begin?" Amren asked and it sounded more like a threat than an invitation.  

Amren could pull on the power, reaching out and grabbing hold in ways that I couldn't understand. She could use that ability in battle as well but it was dangerous. An uncontrolled wave was always dangerous. I had never seen her use it as a weapon but I could imagine her using this ability to drain an opponent and it was a little bit terrifying.

The first wave of power came as fire. Everything was wet enough from the last time that it didn't catch but the heat rushed past me and out into the space beyond. If any spies were watching the palace, we were certainly putting on a good show today. The second was wind again and I knew my hair was going to be a rat's nest by the end of this but I still tried to smooth it down as I saved an apple from being blown toward the edge with the rest of the table. 

When the darkness hit us, I almost stopped breathing. It was mine. It felt like mine but as I watched it I could start to categorize the ways that it wasn't quite mine. A variation on a theme, not a copy. This magic felt softer than the torrents of water and wind but it was strong enough to blot out the sun and I pushed my own power out to meet it. I wove my power into it, taking stock, feeling along the edges of what she could do and fitting myself to it. Instinct, like an animal recognizing a pack member. At that thought, I rolled myself back in and a moment later the darkness faded. 

They were both looking at me. Amren with a little glare, Feyre with something on the line between awe and terror. I shrugged and pretended I was looking at the spell work on the bracelet in my hand. I couldn't figure out where Tamlin had found something like this. 

Amren didn't manage to push Feyre to tears again but I could feel the swell of unnameable emotion on the other side of the bond as the fog roiled. It would start to clear unless some permanent damage had been done.

I called an end to it because Feyre was too stubborn to ask and Amren was as fascinated by the pulse of different magics as I was. She hadn't had a problem pushing a child to the breaking point, she wouldn't hesitate to see how far Feyre could go either.

Feyre looked relieved and a bit triumphant as the last of the final wave rolled away. It had been darkness again and I'd refrained from cuddling up against it this time. It had been 

I told Feyre where to find her rooms and paused with Amren before going to try and get my own head screwed on straight. 

"I like her," Amren said. 

I turned slowly to look at her and my eyebrows drew together as I did, "Do you?"

"Does she hate you or love you? I can't tell." 

"I think she hates me." 

"Hmm. She would make a better ally than an enemy. If war is coming, I think we might benefit from having something like that on our side."

"Someone, Amren. She is not a something." 

"She is unlike anything or anyone who has come before." 

"I know," I said and then, rather than face whatever commentary Amren had on that comment, I winnowed back to Velaris to fix my hair and put on clothes that didn't smell like smoke or rainwater or Feyre.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just need to admit this: Rhys being hugely turned on by Feyre's ability to destroy everything is my favourite part of writing this story.


	3. The Dreams

The next day, Feyre was sharper and angrier than had seemed possible when I'd seen her sitting at breakfast at the Spring Court. She joined me at breakfast in the cleaned but not yet repaired hall that she had destroyed the day before. She sat down and started asking questions. Questions about where I had gone, about how Amren did what she did, about where exactly we were, about the Court of Nightmares in the mountain below us. 

"Is there a point to this interview?" I asked. 

She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms, "I just wanted to see if I would get a straight answer to something." 

"Have I been living up to your expectations?" 

"You really don't know what Amren is?"

"Old, powerful, not born into the body you see her in, but as to specifics, she doesn't share, we don't pry." 

And then it was right back into questions, "Don't you have other things to be doing?"

"I'll be spending the afternoon in the Northern Mountains making sure the last dregs of an exceptionally annoying rebellion have been put thoroughly down but I had to eat first and I would rather do it with you than in an army camp at high altitudes," I said. 

She looked at me with a little bit too much intensity and I returned the gaze. She looked away first but it wasn't in fear or even embarrassment, it was with the flicker of a smile. 

"Who rebelled?"

"Some of the Illyrian war bands were rather fond of Amarantha and enjoyed all the pillaging. The last of them were brought to heel just hours before the Gathering. I haven't been up to," I paused and chose my words carefully, "Explain to them why they should not do that again." 

From there the questions wound on to other things. She seemed to genuinely mean it when she said that all she wanted was a straight answer. She asked about the Priestesses, about the history behind the Gathering, about Illyrians in general. When she asked something I wouldn't answer I told her that. It was still a little like an interrogation but it wasn't an unpleasant interrogation and she was watching me the entire time which felt like permission to stare back.  

I left her with Amren and didn't make it back until nearly noon the next day. 

That was the fault of Cassian and Morrigan who wanted to know what kind of secret project I had Amren working on in the Court of Nightmares. The truth just led to a whole new onslaught of questions and somehow that ended up with the three of us and most of a bottle of liquor on the roof of the townhouse until nearly dawn. We hadn't talked about mating bonds but we had debated powers and the possibilities of Feyre agreeing to help us in the coming war with Hybern and then the conversation had become that kind of nothing that I had forgotten about. In my time under the mountain I had forgotten about those conversations with friends where nothing was said for hours but it still felt momentous and essential as air. 

I had fallen into bed just before dawn and given myself a few hours of sleep before winnowing back to find the hall in tatters. Again. Seeing the evidence of her ability to tear a place to ribbons hadn’t lost its thrill. 

"Good day?" I asked surveying the damage. 

"We should probably move onto proper training either today or tomorrow. Without the ability to use the new power effectively, she will simply start building up unhealthy reserves again and then we'll have to start all over," Amren said. 

"I am sitting right here, don’t talk about me like I’m your damn pet project," Feyre said. 

I straightened and looked between her and Amren. Amren's hair was rumpled by wind or some other power but she was otherwise neat and tidy and standing very straight. Feyre knelt on the floor wearing a purple suit of court clothes that were wet enough to be sticking to her in very distracting ways. She looked exhausted  and was bracing herself with her hands flat against the moonstone floor and her hair hanging in her face. 

"When you're ready to stand up and try again, let me know," Amren said. 

"Bitch," Feyre said. 

"Stand up, and stop complaining," Amren said. 

I raised my eyebrows at both of them but neither of them were paying me any attention. The last time Morrigan had called Amren something that had even approached an insult like that a building had been destroyed. I would have thought the word "bitch" would have led to war. Feyre leveraged herself back to her feet and pushed her hair back from her face with trembling hands but then she rolled her shoulders back and looked Amren in the eye.

"Better," Amren said. 

Feyre flipped her a rude gesture. The corner of Amren's mouth twitched in the ghost of a smile. That was it. Amren didn't so much as mutter a threat before they were back to the terrifying display of power and magic. Months of pent up magic were spilling out of Feyre's body but the hurricane and the waves of midnight were gone. This was smaller. Feyre called the power herself and then Amren pulled on it. It was the start of control. They had done more in three mornings than I had managed in weeks of training as a child. 

When Amren finally called an end to it, Feyre was shaky but fiercely proud. She didn't collapse into a soggy chair until Amren was out of the room. 

"I'm glad that's going well," I said.

"How was your defeated army?" she asked. 

"Defeated which is really the best you can ask for. Some of them are now dramatically dead and the others have been sent back to training camps very far from one another. How are the gaping holes in your heart?"

"What?" 

"That's what it felt like to me the first time she started doing that, like the magic had been filling up empty places and with it gone, I was left with holes in my heart and my soul. It wasn't pleasant." 

"I can think again, if the price is holes in my soul, then I'll take the holes. I didn’t know how bad the haze was until it was gone. It was like I was missing and hadn't noticed. I guess the feeling of the holes isn't so bad when it brings back some clarity." 

"It will heal in time. Go change into something dry, I'll meet you in the library."

She found me in the library a little while later. The destruction was all limited to that one floor where she had been training and here it was peaceful and calm. Her hair had been washed and brushed and braided back from her face and she wore a dark rose colour that made her look healthier than she had since the Gathering. Or maybe, she was simply healthier than she had been. She sat down in a soft armchair and I took the one across from her. I had had food sent up and she ate as I started to talk. 

I talked about magic and how it worked. About flow and blockages and how to bring it into line. Amren could have done this but I had wanted the excuse to spend time with her. It was theory. It was the why before we started on the how. She was still shaky and pushing her to start really using the magic after the morning she had had seemed like a bad idea. 

She tucked her feet up into the chair and leaned her head against the cushion as she asked, "How can it both come from me and be like a river flowing through me?" 

"Every river has a source. You are the source as well as the conduit," I said. 

She nodded but gave a little frown. I had no idea if she understood what I had said or not. I tried to adjust the explanation but a moment later, her eyes were falling shut. I sat and watched her as she fell asleep. It happened fast. One moment she was watching me, asking questions and considering my answers and then she was drifting away. 

I took the moment to stare once she was dozing. 

A long moment. 

I stood and hesitated before I picked her up. I cradled her for a moment and she nuzzled into my chest. I could have winnowed her downstairs but I walked. I carried her down through the ruined hall where the evidence of her power was still there in puddles and scorch marks and shattered lanterns. 

She woke about halfway there and blinked up at me. 

"Rhys?"

Had she said my name? I couldn't remember the last time I had heard her say my name. It made me stop.

"Which one of you is real?" she asked. 

"There's only one of me," I said. 

"No, there's two and I don't know which one is real," she said. 

Before she could explain what she meant by that, she was drifting off to sleep again. I tucked her into her bed and smoothed the blankets around her. She didn't wake again and I didn't let myself stay in the room with her. I forced myself to the office I kept in the building and sifted through Court of Nightmares paperwork I had been putting off for weeks. I fell asleep at the desk sometime after sunset. 

I was awoken to her nightmare. 

It hit me as hard as one of my own might have.

The horror and desperation slammed through the remnants of the shield I had lazily thrown against the bond. The force of the emotion took me by surprise and I winnowed to her without thinking that choice through. She was retching over the toilet. I gathered her hair back from her face and waited for her to finish. When it was over, she slid back to lean against me. I hadn't realized how close she was until her shoulders slumped into my chest. 

She pulled away after a few deep breaths and I didn't want to let her go. 

She washed her face and her mouth and shook off the worst of the clinging feeling of the dream. She looked at me where I still sat against the wall. I waited for her to be the one to speak. She didn't. She crossed the space to me and slid back down in front of me. I held out an arm for her and she let me pull her in against my chest. 

This was nature. It wasn't anything but a natural reaction to the mating bond. Scent and touch and primal things held more sway when you were injured or sick and that was all that was fueling this. 

Logic didn't save me. She was too close for anything but the smallest corner of my mind to care about logic.  

She had come to me and tucked her face in against me and was breathing in my scent and every corner of my heart wanted it to last forever. 

"I have two kinds of dreams," she said into the crook of my neck. 

I didn't interrupt her. I was leaning against the wall and she was curled in my lap and holding on. I smoothed her hair back from her forehead and kept my other arm cradled around her back. I hadn't let myself imagine being this close to her, it had seemed like an impossibility. It still felt a little bit like an impossibility even as I could feel her breathing against my neck.  

"I dream about being under the mountain. I dream about those two fae and-" she cut off and pressed her face a little closer but the nausea passed. 

"I know," I said. 

"I thought when the nightmares stopped that it meant that the bracelets were working, that I was healing, that my soul wasn't damned for what I had done," she said. 

"You are not damned," I said. 

"I killed them, their eyes haunt me," she said. 

"You are not damned," I repeated. 

She didn't answer that but she shifted a little in my arms so she was pressed in more tightly and could wrap an arm around my back. I didn't want to have a conversation like this on a bathing room floor. I gathered her up and stood. I carried her back to the bedroom and sat down on the bed without letting go of her. She rearranged herself around me and didn't argue or question. 

Impossible. 

Impossible but I was losing the arguments with myself as to why.

We settled in against the pillows at the headboard, sitting but still curled together. Her head kept finding that place at the crook of my neck like it belonged there. The blankets were rumpled and I was still fully dressed but it was comfortable in the way of safe spaces and favourite memories. The nightmare was loosening its grip on her. She was calming and breathing more easily the longer we sat together. 

"My other dreams are about you," she said into the quiet. 

I didn't answer that. I couldn't answer that. I didn't know what to say. 

"They started about a month after... everything," her voice wasn't much more than a whisper, "I had the first dream the night after the first time my magic appeared. I didn't realize what it was then, I melted the china of a plate during an argument. I didn't even realize it had happened. Later the magic would be harder to ignore but it started so small."

“The dreams came just after the magic started and they didn't make much sense. They weren't of anything. Just little fragments. Hands holding a coffee mug. The sun reflected off the water running under a bridge. Maps and papers covered in messy notes. A fist fight or maybe sparring, I couldn't tell. Things like that. Then one day it was a pair of men in armour with wings like yours and they were pushing open a pair of doors onto a stone throne room and I felt the power. I knew it was you."

My heart was beating faster. She raised a hand and let it rest on my breastbone as though she could hear it. Maybe she could. Her fingers fussed with the fabric of my shirt front. It was somehow more intimate than her head on my shoulder or her body pressed into mine. Comfortable. That was the difference, she was touching me like she was completely at ease with me. 

"I thought for a long time that it wasn't just you, that somehow maybe when I was brought back that I had found myself with little windows into all the High Lords. It was you in that throne room. It was you when you broke every bone in that man's hand. The night sky and the flying, that was you too. But the quiet mornings and the cafe tables. Or the art shop. Or the joking with a jeweler over a necklace. Those couldn't be you. They just couldn't be," she said. 

I tried to match up her impressions to things that I had done in the last few months. They were all me. How much of Velaris had she see through my eyes? I was rarely anywhere else unless it was unavoidable. 

"And then there was a dream of a restaurant. You sat there with a little group of people and the man across from you said something that made the waitress hit him with a towel and everyone laughed and I realized the laughing man with his wings and his messy hair was the same one who had glanced back at you before you had entered the throne room. No weapons, no armour, no stony expression, just laughter. I think I had known for a lot longer than that. It was all you. The cafes and the war plans and the torture and the laughter. It was all you," she said. 

"The man whose hands I broke was a Winter Court spy who had taken some things he should not have touched," I said as though I needed to defend myself. Then I added, "And she isn't a waitress, nor the cook, she is the proprietress of that little restaurant and we have been going there for at least two centuries. If you ever meet her don't call her the waitress, she'll hit you too. I don't remember what Cassian said but I am quite sure he earned being hit with that towel."

She laughed at that. A little cut off sound as though she had tried to stop it too late. 

"It's all you," she said. 

"I'm a complex person," I said like it didn't matter. 

"You're a monster, you were always a monster, everyone knows that."

"I have worked hard to ensure that everyone knows that." 

"So who are you really?"

"A monster, a person, a High Lord, a disgusting half-breed, it depends on who you ask." 

"You're a half-breed? You're High Lord." 

"My mother was an Illyrian like Cassian and Az. If you haven't seen Azriel in one of those dreams, you probably will. My father was High Fae. I've been High Lord long enough that no one seems to be bothered by it any more but there was a time when it was something of a scandal." 

She nodded but didn't say anything else. 

I inhaled her scent and almost let the conversation go but there was something about the quiet of the palace, even the wind was calm tonight, and her nearness and the strange novelty of someone trying to understand me. 

All of me. 

Not just the piece they needed but all of me from mornings when I woke too early and unrested to my few truly joyful moments to the violence and rage that I sometimes used as a weapon and sometimes let take control of me. 

Something about all of that made me open my mouth and start talking. 

"The first time I dreamed about you was more than three years ago," I said turning my face so that I was speaking into her hair. She went completely still. "It was the same, fragments and images and your scent. I woke to the scent of you often enough that it was familiar before we ever stood in the same place. Rabbits or the woods in winter. A crackling fire or hay bales. Such mundane things but for so long my life had been nothing but under the mountain and the things she wanted that I held onto each fragment like it was a line thrown to a drowning man." 

"Rhys," she started but the sentence didn't go anywhere so I kept talking. 

"I saw you painting. Flowers. You were painting flowers on a table. It was the only time I ever reached back. It wasn't a real bond, not like we have now but there was enough of a connection for me to push an image to you. The night sky over my childhood home. A place I wasn't sure I would ever see again. I wanted someone to see it. I wanted you to see it so maybe it wouldn't be lost forever. Then one day, you were here. The things you were seeing, the creatures you saw, they were ours, they belonged to this side of the wall," I said. 

"Calanmai?" she said. 

"I was there because I saw it and I knew where you were. For the first time in years of fragments and flashes, you were someplace I could identify. The lies I had to tell to get permission to leave that night were elaborate but worth it," I said. 

She turned in my arms and sat up to look at me and the spell broke. I was sitting in bed with her and for every traded dream, we did not know each other. I didn't know if I could trust her to keep my secrets. Even now, like this, I hadn't been able to say the name of the city I had grown up in, where the cafes and bridges and restaurants she had seen were. 

How could I love someone this much without being able to trust them?

I was looking up at her with that thought in my eyes and didn't know if she was seeing the love or the doubt. Whatever she saw, it didn't scare her. She trailed her fingers down my cheek and I stayed still under her touch. I was looking up at her so when her palm settled against my jaw, she didn't need to tip my face up. 

She kissed me. 

Softly. 

The world narrowed down to her. She was everything. I reached up and slid one hand into her hair and pulled her closer. I caught her around the waist and held on. I kissed her back harder and her mouth opened as she met me with as much strength. A low sound, between a growl and a groan, escaped and I felt her smile at it. I felt that smile and returned it without opening my eyes and she kissed me again while the smiles got in our way.

I grabbed her so that I could roll her down into the rucked up blankets and scattered cushions and pin her body below mine. Her arms tightened around me. She was holding on as tightly as I was and the taste of her, the scent of her was filling up my senses. I slid my mouth down along her jaw, nuzzled that hollow behind her ear and then made my way down her throat to her collarbone as she arched under me. 

"Rhys," she said. 

"I like the way you say my name," I murmured into her skin. 

I pulled a little on the fabric of her clothing to find more skin to taste. Her head rolled back and her hand came up to stroke my face as I kissed her breast bone, just below where her collarbones joined. She was still so thin but she was so much healthier than she had been even days ago. And she was so close. Close and relaxing into my touch and returning every kiss and making my heart soar and stutter in an attempt to match itself to hers. 

Her fingers on my face ruined it. 

I felt the drag of the ring on her finger against my cheek and it took me a moment to remember why I needed to care but when it came back, it came back in a rush.  I took her wrists and held them but didn't sit up. The doubt and the logic weren't quite enough to overpower the desire. She looked up at me and shifted, responding as much to the restraint as she had to my mouth on her skin. Our eyes met and she fell still as she realized the expression on my face had gone empty. I was very carefully keeping it empty as though that could save me from this. 

I let go of her hands and sat up and then farther back. I leaned against the foot board of the bed, stretched out my legs and crossed my ankles. I pretended that I was as relaxed as the pose was and that my heart wasn't still beating out her name and that I wasn't so hard it was making me a little crazy to not be touching her. 

"Rhys," she said. 

Too far away. Every nerve in my body was whispering it until it had become as loud as a scream. Too far away. I rubbed the back of my neck and looked away from her and the neckline of her shirt which was pulled askew. Which I had pulled askew. 

Damn it. 

"What exactly do you know about mating bonds?" I asked. 

"Not enough if you're looking at me like that. You and Amren obviously trained together, she is also fond of the glower until the student magically understands method of education," she said. 

I smirked at that but when I spoke it wasn't a joke, "It isn't something that can be reversed." 

I crawled back up the bed towards her. I uncoiled and went slow. I wanted her undivided attention, even if I was being a bit of a prick but I was annoyed and wasn't feeling charitable. I watched her expression shift with each movement. 

Fuck. 

I wasn't sure I'd ever seen anyone look half that hungry. Her gaze didn't waver even as she bit her lower lip and leaned towards me. I got close. Crawled up over her body so I was propped up over her. I wasn't actually touching her but it was a near thing. I took her hand by the wrist and held it up where we could both see it. Even in the dark the wedding ring was visible. 

"You have things that you need to sort out," I said. 

She opened her mouth and then glanced at her hand and closed it again. She pulled back and I let her wrist go as she straightened. 

“When you’ve figured out what you want, let me know,” I said and then winnowed without standing.


	4. The Woods

I was waiting for her in the morning with every shield and every detail of my mask perfectly in place. I was wearing leathers and even without all the weaponry, it was enough to relax me. Who I was was clearer when I had my wings. I meant what I had said to her, there was only one of me but sometimes I hid away so many pieces that I started to lose sight of that. 

Had she dreamed about me last night? I pushed that thought out. 

"Is this hiking gear?" Feyre asked dropping a bundle of clothing on the table. 

"Training leathers, technically, but we'll be using it as hiking gear. Did you need help putting it on?" I said. 

"Is there are a reason, we're going hiking?" she asked. 

"For the past four days, you have been tearing up the palace. People have noticed. Right now, Amren and I are enough cover as no one has gotten close enough to realize what kind of power is being thrown around. I can't do the things you can do with water or fire. Neither can she. So now that people have noticed and are starting to try and spy, we're best to move training to another location," I said. 

"Into the woods?" 

"Yes." 

"I'm not going into the woods with you."

"Amren hates nature but if you'd prefer, I can arrange to send her instead. She’ll be pissy and possibly leave you stranded somewhere when she gets sufficiently annoyed. Not a choice I would make but it is your call."

"Why all the sudden secrecy?"

"Same reason that Tamlin thinks that putting those bracelets on you was a solution. The Courts don't like it when the balance of power changes. You are going to change the balance. It would be beneficial if you were able to defend yourself before anyone tried to do something about you. Until you can, secrecy isn't a bad idea. So we're going to spend the day in the mountains and be back here by dinner." 

"Do something about me? What does that mean?"

"Anything from offers of an alliance to assassination. There is value in being prepared for the worst case scenario." 

There was a flicker of fear on her face before her expression settled into annoyance. I smiled at her. I didn't know if she was annoyed at me or at the prospect of being assassinated. I leaned in, not into her personal space, not quite close enough to touch unless one of us reached out. Some flicker in her eyes might have been that hunger from the night before but it was gone before I could be sure and the annoyance turned hostile. 

"I meant it about helping you dress," I said. 

"Fuck off," she said. 

"If you insist. I'll meet you here in an hour. I do recommend the leathers and boots, it's still cold that far north," I said before vanishing without waiting for an answer. 

My mind was more than a little bit preoccupied with the idea of her dressing. It brought up memories of that shirt tugged away from her throat and I’d been struck by the idea of going over to her and slipping it to the side just to see if I’d left marks on her skin last night. So I winnowed away before I did or said something I would regret.

She met me fully dressed an hour later and I let the smile show through as I scanned her. She didn't look comfortable in fighting leathers but she looked good. The look in her eyes was sharp and bright and even with her thinness and the dark circles under her eyes, she looked like herself again. I took a step towards her and the way she watched me made me want to cancel our plans and pull that gear off of her piece by piece. 

Fuck. 

It was going to be a long day. 

I held out a hand and she looked at me warily. I was sure, very sure, that my thoughts hadn’t shown through on my face but maybe she was picking it up through the bond. I needed to do some research on shielding against mating bonds before this one ate me alive. 

"Unless you've learned to winnow yourself while I wasn't looking," I said. 

She was wearing heavy gloves so I couldn't see if she was still wearing the ring as she put her hand in mine. I tugged her forward. She stepped in close and refused to look at me. I took a deep breath of her scent mixed with the leather and metal of her clothing before we winnowed away from the palace and into Illyrian lands. 

I’d chosen a spot that put us a long way from anyone. There was a war camp only a day's walk away but I didn't want to take her there and I hadn't warned them that I was coming so it was probably best to avoid that. Cassian knew and Mor knew. I would have told Amren if she had asked but she was off doing whatever it was that made Amren happy, polishing jewels or drinking fresh blood. Az was busy. I didn’t tell anyone outside of that circle about my plans unless it was unavoidable.

We reappeared below a dull cloudy sky.  

Feyre turned in a circle as she stepped away from me, scanning the mix of pines and bare branches around us and the jagged peaks rising beyond. Some snow still hid  near the trunks where the shade was thickest but we stood in a clearing of scrubby brown grass that would have looked better hidden by snow. It looked lonely and cold and a long way from anything comfortable.

"We'll go back when the sun falls to the tree line or when you decide we do," I said from the edge of the clearing we had landed in. 

I was giving her space. This plan was a little bit of a whim. Azriel had mentioned that there were people in the Hewn City and the villages around the mountain who had noticed but coming to the mountains had been a spur of the moment plan that morning. I needed the air and the space and the distance from the rest of my responsibilities. I hadn't realized how isolated it was until we were here.

She looked up at the sky, noting where the sun was and then looked at me over her shoulder. The isolation didn’t make her pause. She gave me just the hint of a smile and said, "So teach me something." 

* * *

  
It was fun. I don't know what I had expected. To be awed perhaps, to be annoyed and frustrated and to want to push her up against a tree and forget all the reasons that I shouldn’t make her look at me like I was something to eat. I had expected to spend the day to be a little bit uncomfortable for both of us. I hadn't expected it to be fun. 

I started with a review of the lesson she had slept through but with more practice. She bit back today. Every response was a retort. She called me a prick and worse things when I annoyed her for any reason. It took a lot of back and forth to start to learn how she thought and how she could use those thoughts to control the magic.

“I picture it, doors and walls and passages that the magic travels along. I can close up certain powers in certain rooms, I can allow others to run free, I can keep the magic flowing even when it isn’t in use so it doesn’t sink into my bones and my mind,” I said. 

“Doors and walls?” she said. 

“Start with a shield between you and the rest of the world. Create the wall then worry about doors,” I said. 

She learned how to shield faster than I had expected. There was no more haze at the end of the bond between us and I could step right into her mind. Her immediate reaction every time was panic and then she’d slam the shields shut and force me out. That was not easy to do. I was nearly impossible to push out once I was in. I might have been able to beat her if I was willing to hurt her but anything short of tearing her mind apart as she pushed me out of it was impossible. 

Once she had that figured out, controlling the powers on their own was easier and that meant the rest of our afternoon was just a matter of practice. She struggled with using wind and fire with any precision and using water with any power. Her darkness was visually impressive but it was another she couldn’t find enough precision to weave with much nuance.

“It’ll come, you haven’t even been using these powers for a week yet. You’ll still be learning new things about your abilities five hundred years from now,” I said. 

“I keep dropping it.” 

“I noticed, keep practicing.”

I made the mistake of laughing when a little tendrils of water she pulled from a stream collapsed again and again. A noise in the forest pulled my attention and as soon as I was looking away, she hit me with a blast of air that carried more than enough water to leave me sputtering and rounding on her in a fighting stance. She just flicked a little more water at me and then sat back down and went back to work trying to pull larger and larger columns of liquid up into the air without dropping them. 

I scooped up a handful of water and held it. Controlling the water itself was something I couldn't do but levitating liquid ended up looking much the same. I started breaking little pieces off the ball in my hands and flinging them at her head. The argument could be made that it was intended to test and train her reflexes but the truth was that my hair was wet and starting to freeze against my skin and I wanted retribution. She turned to glare at me. 

"If you do that again, I will set you on fire," she said as the first little drop dripped down the back of her head and into her braid. 

"Try," I said. 

She dropped the water and stood. I waited with my ball of water in my hands as she gathered her power. I was fast enough to side step it. The fireball tore past and hit a tree behind me and it splintered and smoldered but didn't catch. Power but no precision. I threw the water towards her and winnowed twice so she saw me coming but couldn't stop me before I grabbed her around the waist and spun her back against a tree trunk. She gasped. 

"I win," I said.

"This isn't a game,” she complained.

"Isn't it? Do you want a rematch?" I asked. 

She stared at me. So close. I could smell her again but I kept my expression neutral. 

"No winnowing," she said. 

I leaned back and considered the request without letting her go. She was pinned between the tree and my body and had her hands up on my chest as she watched my face. I nodded and let her go, taking a few steps back because otherwise I was going to kiss her. I bowed to her as though we were engaged in a dance instead of a sparring match and as soon as I straightened she hit me with another splash of water carried on a rush of air that hit hard. 

What followed wasn't quite sparring. 

She had more range to her abilities than I did but my training and power were enough to keep the fight from being fair. She didn't know how to fight either which set her at a strategic disadvantage. Even with all that, I could feel the potential in every hit she landed. She was paying attention, adjusting and rethinking her reaction to each move I made. Learning and adjusting and getting better. 

It was better training than setting challenges for her to work with and it was far more fun. 

She knocked me down in a rush of air that caught my wings in a way that natural wind never could. It pushed me backwards and up and the only way to keep from getting thrown completely was to tuck the wings in and roll out of the gust. My head hit the ground and she came to cross her arms and smile down at me with a little spark of triumph in my eyes. 

"I think I win that round," she said. 

I spun off the ground and took her feet out from under her with my knee. I was faster than her fall and I was able to get hold of her before she fell. I  rolled her onto her back. It was fast and it wasn't magic. She had been braced for magic and the brute force of simply being knocked down had taken her by surprise. Her mouth was open and she yelped as she landed. 

I could feel her under me and our faces were very close together. Her breath was warm against my face and I let my thoughts show through. She inhaled and shifted just a little bit and I smiled at her and pushed a strand of cold wet hair off her forehead. I did it idly, as though we did this all the time and touching her was not making my skin feel too tight for the rest of me. 

"You did win that round. Congratulations, did you want a prize?" I asked in a low voice. 

"What happened to figuring things out?" she asked. 

"You," I said still tucking pieces of hair back from her face, "Are the one who needs to figure things out, I know what I want."

She went very still beneath me. That was too much honesty. I held her gaze as long as I could. Her eyes were intense and so close I couldn’t breathe around this thing between us. I pushed up off her and didn't look away from her as I stood and held out a hand to pull her to her feet. The woods around us smelled like earth and wood smoke from the damaged trees and the undefinable tang of magic as it dissipated. 

"Do you want to fly?" I asked. 

"I want to talk about the things you want," she said. 

"I don't, but if you want to go flying, we can do that. You should have seen the way you smiled when you talked about dreaming of flight last night," I said. 

She didn't answer me. She hadn't backed away after I had pulled her up and she reached out to brush a hand along the membrane of my wing. I hadn't bothered to hide them all day and it had felt freeing, as it always did, to have them out in the open air. I said nothing as I watched her hand but the skin twitched of its own accord under the gentle caress of fingers and she looked back to me. 

"They're a little sensitive," I explained. 

"How sensitive?" 

"Very. But that is not a conversation we're going to have right now, either. Do you want to go back to the palace and wash some of the grime off," I ran a finger down her cheek, rubbing at a smear of dirt there, "Or do you want to go flying?"

"I want to go flying," she said. 

I grinned at her and almost kissed her. 

Again.

Scooping her up into my arms and feeling her lean into me and loop an arm around my neck was almost as good. Taking off from ground level was one of the least impressive things about flying so I threw enough magic down to push us up until I could snap the wings open and start using my body's power to push us higher. She held on until I finally found an updraft in this frozen wasteland that would push me higher without all the flapping. 

I circled lazily. I was barely watching the world around us. This was Illyrian territory and it wasn't over private lands. People flying by was as notable as people walking down a village path. We were unknown and unremarkable and that made us all but invisible. I was keeping most of my attention on her and every shift in her expression as she watched the world below us. I pushed us upwards until we were catching wind currents as they rolled down off the mountains and I could coast. 

"Are you ready?" I asked. 

"Ready for what?" she said. 

"Do you scream?" 

"Why? What are you going to do to me?"

"All kinds of things but let's start with this." 

I tucked my wings in and held her close as I barrel rolled and then started to fall. She did scream. Her fingers twisted in the weapons harness I hadn't bothered to load and her arm around my neck tightened. I laughed as we dove for the tree line. I snapped the wings open to catch the fall long before it would have been dangerous but she punched me in the chest as we leveled out and I laughed at her. 

“Warn me next time,” she gasped. 

“We’re going to need some more altitude before we can do it again,” I said. 

“Are you trying to kill me?”

“I swear, I will not drop you.” 

The first arrow hit as I banked back toward where we had started. I was still smiling when the pain it. It was just pain and it too me so completely by surprise that I barely reacted to it. 

Then the second arrow hit. 

We were under attack. 

Here. 

I did three things at almost the same time. 

I pushed as much magic as I could into pushing Feyre away from me and towards the trees, I sent a rush of visual imagery and explanation at Mor, and I tucked my damaged wing in tight and tried to make the dive look intentional but I was hit again before I made it to tree cover and I was starting to lose consciousness before the impact of the branches. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was so sure this was a 4 chapter fic but then I decided to wallow in my shippy tropes and wrote 3000 words of training montage instead of the like 500 I had intended so it got pushed a little longer. I think the story will end up being 6 chapters instead. Probably. 
> 
> I'm playing a little fast and loose with the plot points from canon here.
> 
> By the time line of the book, this matches up approximately with where Rhys was injured in the story as well (a little earlier) but my headcanon - which isn't going to show up in the story because it is not a fic about plot, it is a fic about shippy tropes - is that in this world because they didn't have Feyre, Rhys and crew went to the Mortal Queens for their half of the book first. They managed to beat Hybern there and win the Queens over without having to sacrifice Velaris because without their suspicions being raised by Jurian, Rhys and Mor weren't nearly as threatening and Mor's "I am the Morrigan" bit actually worked. They have no way to get the Prythian half yet but they've done enough to get Hybern following them around and trying to stop them. Which is why they're getting attacked here:
> 
> But really, I'm just going to gloss the attack and the rescue and jump right to recovery in the next chapter because that's the part of the story that interests me and I'm the fanfic author and I can write self indulgently if I so desire *evil laughter*


	5. The Camp

When I woke to myself, fully myself, I was in a war camp building. I could recognize it by smell alone. The flashes of clarity through the poison had all been of Feyre. I didn't remember anything else since the torture had ended. There was torture and then there was her. There was nothing but flashes in between. There was nothing connecting the moments of her in the cold and damp to where I was now. 

I tried to raise my head and the muscles in my back and the membranes of both wings shrieked in pain. 

Healing but not healed. 

"Stop that, you're going to tear out the stitches," Mor said from somewhere outside my field of vision. 

"Where am I?" I asked. It was a vulnerable question and I hated it but it was Mor. Mor would give me a straight answer and if there was anyone who could see me at my worst and not betray me, it was her. 

"Number oh-four-three as they have so creatively and poetically named this training camp," Mor said. 

"How'd I get here?" my voice slurred. 

"She brought you in. You must have told her where to bring you or winnowed the two of you in yourself because you just appeared in the middle of the camp square two days ago," Mor said. 

I forced my eyes to focus on Mor. She was sitting by the edge of the bed with a book in hand. Her golden hair was swept up in an annoyingly perfect knot. I still felt like I had one foot in the grave and she'd spent time on her hair this morning. She smiled at me when she noticed I was looking. Her eyes flashed and she didn't seem relieved. She took it all in stride as though people regularly sent her messages as they fell to their deaths and it wasn't anything to worry about. 

"I am glad you're awake. If you died without an heir, Amren and I would technically have to take over and that would have been chaos," Mor said. 

My attention wandered a little as she chattered. She knew I wasn’t listening so she kept herself to talking about camp food and when Azriel was expected to arrive and other details I didn't really need. I was grateful for the sound of something familiar and good. It was so good to have her voice there as I tried to make sense of the gaps in my memory.

Between me and where Mor sat at the edge of the bed was mass of messy golden brown hair. 

I lay on my stomach so my wings could be spread on either side of me and smeared with enough medicinal salves to mask any other scent, even Feyre's. Feyre. Who was tucked in under the wing. Now that I was paying attention and unraveling the sensations, she was sleeping curled against my side. Facing away but warm and close. 

"Is she hurt?" 

"No, a few bruises. She has a hell of a temper, I wish you had introduced me sooner. I like her. " Mor said. 

"I thought I had terrible taste in women?" I said. 

"You do," Mor laughed, "But she's your mate, not someone you found in a dance hall. You didn't actually pick her. That obviously makes all the difference."

I snorted out the first part of a laugh but it pulled some partially healed muscle in my chest and I cut the sound off with a wheeze. Mor frowned like she wasn’t sure whether or be concerned or to mock me.

The warmth beside me shifted. Feyre raised her head but didn’t turn to me, she looked at Mor who smiled, pointed in my direction. Feyre twisted and went still. Mor stood in one graceful motion, looking ridiculously out of place in this camp with her fancy hair and blue silk top. 

Mor said, “Look at the time, I need to be somewhere else.”

"By the Cauldron, Mor, I don't know how you survive being so subtle," Feyre muttered. 

"Practice," Mor said to her as she gave me a significant look as though Feyre's comment was the definitive finale in a long standing argument. I didn't understand it but maybe I was still drug addled. I cocked my head at her but she was already standing and moving away. Feyre shifted beside me and drew back as she rolled over so that she wasn't against me anymore. She was still under my wing but she wasn't touching me anywhere else. Her face was drawn and her eyes were worried. 

"How's the pain?" she asked. 

"Tolerable," I said. 

"I should give you some space." 

"No, stay. Tell me what happened." 

She did. She didn't get any closer but she stayed there under the wing and talked in a low even voice. She told me what she remembered of the attack and told me the story of tracking them through the dark. Apparently, I had winnowed us here after I'd started to recover but the poison hadn't entirely cleared when it had happened. I barely remembered it even though I must have been awake enough and threatening enough that the camp bosses had been treating Feyre much the same way they treated Mor, with respect and maybe a little bit of fear. 

"You've been here longer than a week," I said after mentally doing the math. 

She sighed and rolled over to look at the ceiling. I shifted the wing so it wasn't so hard to see her face and she looked startled at the reminder that the wing was a piece of me and not just a leathery blanket. The one on her side wasn't as badly injured as the other. I could move it without too much pain as long as I kept my shoulder still. Feyre looked back at me and then at the wing again. It was draped over her but the blanket she was lying under meant she wasn't actually touching it. 

"Mor took me back as soon as she got here," Feyre said. "It was still during that final day so the bargain was honoured but it was mid afternoon and I was still a bloody mess." 

"You were hurt?" 

"No, you were. It was your blood but it made a pretty dramatic picture. The leather clothes and blood in my hair and everywhere else. I smelled like poison and caves and you and blood and I don't know which one was worse. Tamlin was mad. Lucien looked like he was going to pass out and Mor was so worried about you that she was making it all worse just by standing there. There are invading armies that aren't as dramatic as Morrigan when she's angry."

"That's true."

She fell silent. I was lying on my stomach and didn't have enough range of motion with the still healing wounds to sit up and really look at her as she stared at nothing at some point above us. I didn't have a good enough angle to even make a guess at what her expression was. I reached out and ignored the way the injuries in my back screamed and lay my hand on her arm. 

She turned back to me, lying on her side now and suddenly closer than I expected her to be. A breath of space between us. I shifted my wing so it curved around her rather than jutted over her shoulder and this time she didn’t seem to notice. 

"I knew he wouldn't like it but it was my fault that you were out there, that you got injured," she started and I squeezed her arm and shook my head but she kept talking, "And I needed to know that you were recovering. They weren't even sure if the poison was going to clear when I left and I couldn't wait a month to find out. I needed to be here." 

"Feyre," I said when she fell silent again. 

"I knew he'd be unhappy about that. I knew we'd fight about it. I knew that. I knew when I'd asked Mor if she could wait for me that I'd be starting an argument that would have lasted for weeks. He hates you so much." 

This time I waited, hand still on her arm. I let her think and formulate the words. She had gone back to the Spring Court but hadn’t stayed. She wasn’t here because of the bargain. She was here because of me. 

"He would have dragged me into the house,” she said.

The silence stretched again then she continued, “He'd been protective and had insisted on guards before the magic started to make me hazy but I didn't expect him to...." she trailed off and then with a little more force behind her words. "He grabbed my arm, he would have dragged my into the house. If he could have done it, he would have. I wasn't expecting to be that angry at him. I thought I was so calm and rational. I think I was still pretending to be happy to see him right up until he touched me like that. 

“I used the wind to push him off and he flared his power at me. At me. If he could have stopped me. He would have if I hadn’t forced him to stop. I don’t know how he could dare-” she started then stopped and when she spoke again it was soft and matter of fact, “So I turned around and left with Mor before he could try." 

I pulled my hand back from her arm so the only place where we were touching was where my wing rested on her shoulder. Her eyes were far away and her face sad and a little lost. 

"This thing with you is," she looked away and then back, "Unexpected." 

"I know," I said.

"I thought I could go home again," she said, "That now that I knew why I was having those dreams, now that I was clear headed again, I could manage it and get past it. Things hadn't been what I wanted them to be but I had been so sick for so long that I thought maybe that was all it was. The haze made it hard to make sense of things and if I felt a little trapped it was because of the magic. Now that I knew what the magic was doing and how to manage it, I could go back and we'd be happy again." 

"Is that what you want?" 

"No," she said without looking at me. 

"What do you want?" I asked.

"You should rest," she said. 

"I can listen and rest at the same time," I said. 

Beyond us, the hospital was quiet. It was a training camp, not a true war camp so there were few injuries. I was the only patient who hadn't been sent back to my tent immediately after treatment. Everything else was broken bones or bloody noses. The medics hadn't come in to check on me yet which I suspected was Mor's doing. We had the place to ourselves. 

"I don't want to be treated like a child. I don't want to be left alone while everyone else is off doing things they won't tell me about. I do not want to be ordered about like a well trained puppy," she said. 

"Good," I said. 

"I should have seven powers and I haven't even scratched the surface of the ones that have come in and I want that too. I want all of it," she said. 

I smiled and closed my eyes as I listened. 

"I want to sleep through the night and I want to see more than the inside of pretty palaces. I want to do something that matters enough to make some amends for the those fae I killed under the mountain. I want to see my sisters again and I want to go flying. I want you to stay awake when I'm talking to you," she said. 

I was still smiling. I wasn't fully asleep yet but I was dozing off. I felt fingers graze my cheek but her hand was gone before I could pull together enough strength to open my eyes. I had thought I was stronger but maybe I did need the rest. She touched me again, fingers in my hair this time but it was as brief as the other touch and then her had was gone. I wanted to open my eyes but that thought was getting lost in sleep. 

"I want you," she said. 

I tried to pull myself back from the brink of sleep to answer that but I wasn't entirely sure it wasn't already a dream. 

* * *

By the next morning I was up and moving but still not strong enough to fly. I needed probably two more at this rate of healing to be back to my usual power. The medics gave up trying to convince me to go back to bed after I walked out of the room. None of them were brave enough to chase me. 

Feyre was off somewhere and I was through being bedridden. If I couldn't fly, I would walk and I went to find Cassian on the training field where he stood with his arms crossed as he watched groups of soldiers run drills. The ones in front of him all faltered when they saw me. 

"Again," Cassian said before turning to me and adding in a quieter more mocking voice, "You look happy."

"They shot me out of the sky and they nearly killed her," I said. 

"Not the fault of those poor doctors," Cass said. 

"I know." 

"Is this mood about Feyre? Where is she?" 

"With Mor, I think." 

"Are you pissy about that too?"

"Go run drills, be useful.” 

“Go find your girlfriend, stop being cranky.”

I snarled at him and he flashed me a grin like it was all a big joke and I wasn’t nearly as scary as I pretended to be. I could have hit him. I considered hitting him but then he would have hit me back and the fight would have thrown the entire camp into chaos for the rest of the day. I had more important things to do than hit Cassian, that could wait until later. 

I found her perched on a low stone wall not far from the field where the soldiers were running their drills. She sat with her feet dangling and her hands braced on either side of her as she stared out at the view. It was a hell of a view. Desolate and empty but the expanse of forest and mountain went on as far as the eye could see. I climbed up beside her and stretched my wings out behind us. I did it in part to test them and see if they still hurt and in part to make sure that anyone who noticed us stayed away. 

She didn't know enough about Illyrians to see the dominance display as anything more than a stretch. I didn't explain it. She reached out and touched the top edge of the wing that extended past her shoulder. It was the one that had sustained the worst hit and while I wouldn't want to rely on it for flight yet, it didn't do more than twinge at the injury spot. 

"How is it?" 

"Better, thanks to everything you did," I said. 

I settled the wing around her like a shell but didn't touch her. I was just providing a bit of a wind break and giving my over active sense of possessiveness the illusion of holding onto her. Nearly three days of having her in bed beside me was enough to completely skew my ability to think straight. She touched it again, where the claw curled in past her shoulder and I gave up trying to think at all and kept my eyes on the view and my body perfectly still. 

"Tell me what you're thinking," she said. 

"I'll trade you a thought for a thought," I said. 

"I'm thinking that I probably ruined any hope I might have had of smoothing things over with Tamlin when I came back here," she said. 

Oh. 

Fuck. 

"If I had it to do over again, I'd make the same choice. I don't know what that says about me," she said.

“That you’re more compassionate than I deserve?” 

“Oh yeah, model of compassion, that’s me.” 

"It was not your fault, not that I was injured nor anything else." 

"Because you would have been out in these woods without me?"

"Because those weren't highwaymen or opportunists. They came prepared for me. Ash arrows and poisons and long range bows as well as those chains. They were in the woods because I was in the woods. If I hadn't gone into the woods, they would have found some other place to try an attack and I might not have had you to save me," I kept my tone teasing. 

"How did they find you?" Her tone was darker. She was angry and more worried than I was allowing myself to be.

"The best guess I have is that they're tracking my magic," I said. I was going to have to talk that thoery through with Amren and Mor before I could be sure but it seemed like the most reasonable answer. 

“So what are you going to do?” 

Around us the wind scattered leaves and brought the sound of sparring from the rings behind us. I could just pick out Cassian’s voice barking orders and making jokes. The mountains were cold and imposing but I had never found them desolate or barren. They weren’t quite home but they were mine somehow and I imagined that they knew it. Feyre was watching them as I looked at her. 

“There are a few options, both for me and for you. I either try and draw them out or disappear and leave flushing them out of these mountains to the war bands while I turn my attention to more important things,” I said. 

“More important than assassins?”

“Assassins are boring even when they come that close to being successful. I do have other things to be doing. We’ll have to work out a few precautions to make sure I am less easily tracked while we’re doing them but that’s manageable. It might take a little while to readjust our plans but it’s a minor setback,” I said.

 “Are you going to tell me these plans?”

“That depends on which option you take.”

“So tell me what my choices are.”

“Go home. Go someplace safe. Stay with me,” I said it like it didn’t matter, like it was a laundry list not the invitation I had been dying to make since we'd talked on the balcony after Amarantha's death. She was silent and I started to doubt that making it had been the right choice. 

“Someplace safe?” 

“There’s a city in these lands that is utterly protected. I won’t set foot there again, not while they’re tracking me, not until I’m sure I can’t lead anyone back there but you could stay there. I have a house you could use and you could pick up your training with Amren.” 

“Where will you be?”

I didn’t hide my grimace, “The best answer is hiding in plain sight in the Court of Nightmares.”

She waited. Her feet swung. She was wearing woolen pants and high boots that came to her knee that I imagined Mor must have brought for her because they certainly weren’t the sort of thing that fit camp regulations. She turned to me and caught me looking so I dragged my eyes up from where the boots hugged her calves to her face and gave her a little smile. 

She just kept waiting. 

“Or,” I finally said into the silence, “If you wanted to, we could disappear for a few days. Call it recovery time. Give Azriel time to do his spying and Cassian time to tear these woods apart.”

I didn’t look away from her as I said it. 

“This is a strategic suggestion?” she asked. 

“No,” I said. 

It had only been a week but the idea of drawing out this knife’s edge we were walking was killing me. I was pushing and it was too early, we were almost strangers, we were still learning to trust each other. 

But she had come back. She had risked her life for mine and she had stayed. She had been sleeping curled up against my side for days. She had been dreaming about me and nothing she had seen, none of those unfiltered little pieces of me at my worst or my best had been enough to scare her away. She sat here with me and didn’t look away and I wanted her too much to be careful or slow. 

“Where do you want to go?” she asked. 

“There’s a cabin I had in mind but I’m open to anything you want,” I said. 

“What do you want from me?” she asked. 

The question stopped me. I wanted her curled against me so that she was all I could smell. I wanted to stand in the center of her magic as it leveled everything around us. I wanted to watch her fight with Amren and laugh with Mor and I wanted to show her every corner of Velaris. But of course, life was more complicated than that. I was High Lord and there were people out there who wanted me dead. 

I must have hesitated too long because she leaned in and said, “I don’t want to go back. I don’t just mean back to Tamlin and the Spring Court. I will not go back to a life like that. I will not go back to guards and palaces and secrets that no one will explain to me. I am stronger than Tamlin and I don’t know if I am stronger than you but I refuse to be treated like a pretty doll to be dressed up and propped up at a party to entertain the guests. I will not live that life again.” 

“I know,” I said. 

I swung around so I was straddling the wall and facing her. The wings were still flared around us but she was either too focused on her anger or too used to them to notice. 

“So what do you want from me, Rhys?” she said. “Because I don’t care how much you smell like sex. There are easier places to find a good fuck.” 

“Not this good,” I said with a leer that was just over the top enough to earn me an eye roll instead of a slap. 

“Not the point,” she said. 

“Maybe not but still true,” I said. 

“I’m glad you think so highly of yourself,” she said. 

I smiled and rolled my head, taking in a breath of mountain air and the smell of cook fires come from the camp. I needed to remind myself that there were still other people in the world. 

“There’s a war coming, Feyre. The people who shot us down didn’t do it for a lark, they did it because I have already been a problem for their king. I would not ask you to stay home while that war is fought. If you don’t want to stay, if you don’t want to deal with this,” I waved my hand rather than try and name it, “Then I would hope you would still consider joining us in what needs to be done to keep Hybern from these shores and the human lands beyond. I would rather you stand as an ally than join me in bed and hide from the rest of it. Though, honestly, I'd like to have both.” 

“I think you need to tell me everything,” she said. 

“It’s cold out here, I need tea before I start discussing politics and war strategies,” I said. 

“Is there tea at this cabin of yours?”

“There could be.” 

“Then let’s have this conversation there.” 

“Conversation?” 

She frowned, just a little and then spun herself so she was straddling the wall and facing me. Her smile was coy as she leaned forward. It was as inescapable as gravity but so much slower. She stopped me with a finger on my chin just before we touched. I cocked an eyebrow but stayed where she held me. 

“I want to have that conversation,” she said.

“We will but is it really your first priority right now?” I asked dropping my hands to her knees. It was a casual touch, light and careless but the look in her eyes said that she knew I didn’t mean it as casual. I let a smile slip in through my serious expression. 

“No,” she said. 

“Good because you have been killing me,” I said. 

“I saved your life,” she said. 

“Save me, kill me, you can do anything you want to me,” I said. 

For once the flash of honesty didn’t feel like it was too much or unwelcome or dangerous ground. She slid closer until her knee bumped mine and then closer still. She hooked her legs over mine so she was very nearly sitting in my lap. I had kept my hand on her as she moved and I was holding on now. 

Her attention snagged over my shoulder and I grinned. I had thrown darkness around us as soon as she started to move and she looked out into the star flecked black and then back to me with wide eyes. She looked good in the moonlight and as much as I wanted to be curled in her magic, I liked having her curled in mine almost as much. 

“Soldiers are terrible gossips,” I said as explanation. 

She laughed and reached up to grab my shirt front and pull our bodies closer before she kissed me. I slid my hands up her thighs, dragging my palms so she would feel every touch. I slid them up over her hips before I wrapped them around her back and held on.

I could smell the subtle shift in her as interest became arousal and kissed her harder as she squirmed a little closer. With less clothing, this position would have so many more possibilities. I used her hair to pull her head back so I could pull her scarf out of the way and run kisses down her neck, tasting her skin. 

I stopped when I found clothing that I was going to have to unbutton and growled in her ear, “We need to be somewhere with far fewer people.” 


	6. The Cabin

After an hour spent placating doctors and leaving orders for Cassian and Azriel, I was only just barely capable of keeping my irritation in check. Feyre caught my eye more than once and each time I almost gave up on the already rushed requirements of vanishing for a few days. Mor, blessedly and possibly for the first time in her entire life, kept her comments to herself when she agreed to winnow us out to the cabin. We still had to make the walk in from the border where the warding kept even Mor and I from winnowing directly to the the door. 

Feyre smiled at the little building as Mor vanished and led the way across the brown, scrubby grass. The things I wanted to do to her were running through my mind as I watched her push open the door and step inside. She tilted her head back and took in the space and it could have been on fire for all the attention I was paying it. 

"Do you know anything about traditions?" I asked. 

"Which traditions?" she asked. 

"Mating bond traditions." 

"I don't know much." 

She turned to watch me. She had taken a few steps into the main sitting room and was scanning the space so there was a gulf between us. It felt ridiculous to have that much space between her body and mine but I leaned back against the door and waited for her to ask. 

"Tell me about them," she said. 

"It's all very primitive and symbolic. Food and servitude," I said. "The male makes an offer of service and protection from his knees and the female makes an offer of food."

She didn't interrupt me so I walked towards her with slow steps and sank to my knees at her feet.  

"The male?" she asked with a teasing smile. 

I hadn't been quite brave enough to say you and me. I needed that little bit of distance because I still couldn't entirely convince myself to trust that she wanted me and that she could be mine. Even on my knees, even with her eyes on me and a teasing smile on her lips. I inhaled her scent and the smell of wood and winter that clung to this place and made a choice. This was what I wanted and I knew it. If she was going to reject me then she was going to do it fully aware of everything I felt. 

"I do," I said with as much weight as I could put into the words, "I do offer you myself. I offer my protection, my support, my body, my kingdom, my love." 

Love. 

I couldn't take that word back. 

I didn't want to. 

She held my gaze, silent. 

"Stay," she said, "Right there." 

I started to argue but she shook her head before I'd even opened my mouth and I closed it with an audible click that made her laugh at me, just a little, just enough to take the edge off of my own nerves. I smiled at her and she turned away from me. 

Fuck. 

I couldn't handle this.

I hadn't touched her when she was close enough and now she was well out of reach. I held onto the way she had looked at me and craned my head to see where she had gone. I looked like she had gone in the direction of the bathroom but she didn't know her way around the cabin so I had no idea what she was actually looking for. I barely succeeded in talking myself out of getting up - twice - before she came back. She held a little bag in hand and I wasn't sure where she'd gotten it. 

She came back to stand where she had been when I had first knelt for her. If I leaned forward two inches, I could press my face into her stomach. She was that close and I could smell the arousal on her. It clung to her skin. She was as impatient and half-mad with it as I was - she had to be - but it didn't show in her face. Her eyes didn't stray from mine but that was the only evidence that she wasn't perfectly relaxed. 

I was going to make her scream my name until this composure was a distant memory. 

She looked down at me and had a flash of shyness as her eyes skittered away and she fiddled with the little bag in her hand. 

"Feyre," I said and I swear that I had meant it to sound comforting but instead I said it like a plea. 

"Open your mouth for me," she said. 

I did. I think I might have stabbed myself or sold out everything I held dear if she had asked me too. I trusted her not to ask. I hadn't learned to trust anyone new since the war. Azriel and Cassian, Morrigan and Amren, even my mother and sister, everyone I trusted, I had met as a child. They had been there for centuries. I did not trust people I had known for months. I did not trust the women I took to bed or the army commanders who argued strategy with me. 

I did not truly trust most people but I trusted her. 

I trusted her so much it made my stomach twist. 

She held a berry to my lips and when I tilted my face to take it from her, she pulled it back out of reach. 

"Swear to me that I won't regret this," she said. 

"I can't do that," I said and a shadow of a frown crossed her face. I reached up and let my hands rest on her knees again, "I can't control what you feel. If you're going to regret this, that's outside my power. I can swear to you that I will never leave you. I can swear that I will never leave you alone and I will never withhold things you need to know or want to know. I can swear that I will love you even when you're stronger than me, especially when you're stronger than me. I know I can't control you and I don't want to. All that I can swear to you." 

She held the piece of fruit out to me again and stayed perfectly still as I took it from her fingers and ate it without looking away from her. She had sunk her teeth into her lower lip and didn't let go of it as a smile started to spread. 

I grabbed her waist and pulled her closer. She sank in my grasp and knelt on the floor with me. I was prepared to let every bit of self control go but she popped another berry into her mouth and held it between her teeth. She tilted her head in an offer and I caught the back of her head to keep her still before I took it from her, mouth to mouth but it wasn't quite a kiss. 

"There are other things I want to eat," I said against her mouth.

"Is there?" she said. 

I looped my arms around her so when I stood I could lift her with me. She yelped and laughed then leaned into me as I carried her. She was still carrying her berries and held out another one to me as I wove around the furniture and into the hall. I took it as she ate one herself. 

"Make a promise," I said. 

"Anything," she said. 

"Promise me that you'll scream my name," I said. 

"You could have asked me to swear unending loyalty to your court and you choose that?" she said. 

"I want you to scream my name more than I want anything else in this moment. There will be time for fealty sometime that isn't now," I said. 

I dropped her onto the bed on her back and started by pulling off the scarf around her neck. She reached to help me and I grabbed her wrists and pushed them back to the mattress. I wanted to do this slowly and carefully and inch by inch. 

She bit her lip but stayed where I put her as I took off her shirt, button by button. I ran my hand up her stomach and she arched into the touch as I stroked each piece of skin I uncovered. I pushed the shirt off, she came up to meet me and help me pull it and the bra off. I pushed her back until she was laid out on the mattress below me. 

I gathered her breasts, they were full and heavy in my hands and when I closed my mouth around one nipple, she moaned. I sucked hard and got another groan and it took a nip to get her to cry out. I switched to the other, gathering it in my hand and playing with the nipple until she squirmed and her fingers tightened in my hair. The gesture was silent but demanding. 

I slid down her body, lips and tongue and little nips to make her tense and gasp. 

I pulled her pants off, fought with her boots for longer than I wanted to and then pulled her to the edge of the bed so she was laid out for me. Naked. Her breaths coming in pants. Her skin hot. Her scent drenched in arousal. Her eyes locked on mine. I reached up and ran my hands along her body. Stomach and breasts, thighs and hips, even her hands and elbows, anything I could reach. 

Mine. 

Her narrow waist and her skin stretched tight over her ribs made me painfully aware of how thin she was. I reached for the bag of berries and held one to her lips and waited for her to take it out of my fingers. Then another. I didn't explain it and she didn't complain. I kissed her without lying down so my body was suspended over hers but not touching.  

"Rhys," she said. 

"Did you want something?" I asked. I was high on the sex and the desire and the way her hair had come loose around her face and her lips had just a little bit of a purple tinge from the berry juice. 

"Stop teasing," she said. 

"If I do, you're going to spend the rest of the day shaking and crying out for me," I said. 

"You say that like you're not going to be screaming my name, too," she said in a breathy gasp that still managed to be confident.  

"Oh, yes, I am, but you're coming first." 

"Promises, promises." 

I laughed and stood up. I pushed her knees wider where they hung off the edge of the bed and knelt for her again. I pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh. She propped herself up on her elbows to watch me as I had explored her body with my hands but as I kissed up her thighs, her head dropped back and then her eyes fell shut before I'd even reached the top. I pushed her knees wider and she shifted her hips for me. 

I licked her a few times just to get the taste of her in mouth. Long slow laps with the flat of my tongue. I wanted to taste her. I wanted to memorize her. I wanted her to be everything I could see and taste and hear and smell. She squirmed below me and I did it a few more times to make sure every bit of her attention was on me before I did anything else. 

I licked harder, first pressure then speed and once she was wet and squirming, I sucked hard and she arched for me without hesitation. I experimented and coaxed, teased and sucked and grazed teeth over very sensitive places until her release found her and she cried out. I held her there. I wanted this first orgasm to last, I wanted her to remember it for centuries. Her body twisted without losing that arched back. I slid my hand into place and pushed two fingers into her without giving her a moment to relax. She cried out as I pushed up towards her stomach and stroked fast and gentle without taking my mouth away. 

She cried out again and I could feel the shift in her body from pleasure to that point of too much and I lifted my head enough to whisper, "You're supposed to scream my name," before dropping back to sucking and stroking as her body fell apart below me. 

"Rhys," she finally gasped out, not a scream but a panting desperate gasp that might have been better. 

I climbed up her body nd I caught her around the waist so I could pull her higher on the bed before I kissed her. She panted into my ear, her face turned against my neck and her body heaving. I laid down on top of her, pinning her naked body beneath my clothed one because I loved the way she shook below me and I wanted to gather up every detail of the sensation.

"Take it off," she said when she got her breath back. Her fingers were clumsy on my collar and I drew back. I straddled her, my knees on either side of her hips as I sat up and started taking off my shirt. She watched me. She barely blinked as her eyes followed my hands. Her mouth didn't close all the way and her chest and cheeks were flushed in the aftermath of the orgasm. 

I did as I was told, taking off the shirt then my pants then lying down over her again so that my straining cock pressed against her stomach as I kissed her. Her hips twisted and she kissed me back even as her body squirmed against mine. Demanding. She was surprisingly demanding. 

"Tell me what you want, Feyre," I said. 

"I want you," she said. 

I could have pushed her, could have made her say any number of dirty things to me but that was enough. 

"You're mine," I said into her ear. 

"So are you," she said. 

The answer didn't really makes sense but I understood what she meant as I pull her knee up so she was pinned on her back and on display below me. 

"I'm what?" I said. 

"You're mine," she said. 

"Yes, I am," I said as I slid into her.

Her body was hot and wet and tightened around me as I sank into her until there wasn't anywhere else to go. I pressed my face against her neck and stayed still for a moment. I draped my wings down so that no matter which way she looked, all she would be able to see was me. That particular show of dominance didn't matter. Her eyes were on my face and didn't stray. I took another moment to enjoy the way she melted into me before I started to move. 

I thrust deep and hard but slow. 

All the way out and then as far in as I could. Over and over until my self control started to crumble and the speed picked up, not less deep but with quick thrusts rather than the long slow ones. I pressed kisses against her face and neck and shoulders, not really caring where my mouth landed as long as it was on her skin. She came again, crying out my name without prompting this time as her fingers bit into my shoulder hard enough that there were going to be marks. I sucked on her throat, where her pulse hammered below thin skin and left a mark of my own in answer. 

I rolled her over before she had come all the way back down from the orgasm. I settled on my back below her with the wings draped out of the bed so that the tips hung of the edge. I don't know if she saw it as a vulnerable position but with the mostly healed injuries in my body still twinging at me, being laid out like this, wings and body and soul below her felt like the most vulnerable thing I could imagine. 

She was flushed and trembling and I was so close to my own release. 

"I'm yours, anything you want," I said to her. 

Vulnerability was its own kind of drug. I was intoxicated by the soft edges of her body and the sound of her breathing. Her hair was a tangled tumble over one shoulder. I loved the little smile on her lips and the way her eyes hadn't lost any of their focus. She was watching me and I wanted her to really see me. I held her gaze. I don't know if I could put it all into a look but I was trying. 

Here is every broken detail of who I am. 

Please, don't run away. 

Please, don't leave me. 

She was as slow as I had been as she found the position and slid down onto me. It made her groan and gasp. She was nearly spent but she wasn't stopping. She balanced above me on her knees and the sense memory of a woman above me tried to pull other things out of my memory but I pushed them back. Feyre smelled like no one else and that scent alone was enough to push out the worst memories. She smiled and ran her fingers along my cheeks. She leaned down for a kiss so our mouths were pressed together as we started too move.

She was tentative at first as though her own body was too sensitive. I didn't rush her. I barely moved. I ran my hands up and down her thighs and I reached up to stroke her cheek with the back of my fingers. I could wait, I could exist like this for centuries and never regret a moment of it. She rocked her body against mine and I let my eyes flutter shut even as I held her close. 

Her lips were on my cheek as she rocked and I held onto her without opening my eyes. I was on the edge and she was so slow that it was killing me. I kept my self control for a long time but it broke and I grabbed her by the hips and pushed her down onto me so our bodies were sealed together as tightly as they could be. She tensed and pushed up on her arms and I put a hand on her stomach and pushed her back until she was sitting and her own body weight held her against me. 

"I need you," I said. 

I needed everything about her. Not just this but I couldn't collect up enough words to say it. 

She didn't answer but she started to rock her hips harder and faster and the angle made sure that I was buried inside her to the hilt. I let my eyes fall shut again though I kept that hand on her stomach to keep her sitting up as she rode me. I came before she did this time. 

Release took me like a hurricane, like I hadn't touched another person in half a century and maybe that wasn't so far from the truth. She didn't stop and I came down from my orgasm to find her still rocking even as my cock started to soften. I put a thumb against her just where our bodies joined and rubbed hard and fast until she collapsed into me with another scream. 

"I am glad to be yours," she whispered as her body relaxed against mine, slipping over to lie against my side with her head on my shoulder. I adjusted so that I could pull her close and feel the muscles in her body calm inch by inch.

"Mine," I said with a little smile. I didn't quite believe it, not yet but I was looking forward to erasing that doubt. "But I know that I'm more yours then you will ever be mine. I've dreamed of you since before we ever met. I belonged to you before we were ever in the same room. Always. Forever." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some process notes because I love talking about process:
> 
> I hated the soup scene and I loved the scene where he knelt before her when he was helping her dress so that's why I added that into the mating bond scene here. I wanted the weird caveman "go the kitchen and make me a sandwich (bowlofsoupwhatever)" bullshit to go both ways so it would make me less ragey. 
> 
> Also a note on the magic causing mental illness in this: I hope it didn't come across as though I was writing out Feyre's depression in favour of a magic solution, I didn't spend a lot of time on it in this fic but the magic depression (her haze and lethargy) were separate from her own mental illness and I hope that the return of her dreams and her vomiting make that evident. She still has to work through that and heal and make her 
> 
> In this world, they come together before she's really come all the way through the worst of her depression or even before they've really learned to trust each other. They'll still have to go through the Weaver and the Summer Court and they'd be growing together as a couple as it happened. (give me battle couple trooooooopes, I thrive on them like foooooood). They'd probably have to go loud and public with the mating bond thing in order to keep Tamlin from being able to start a war. BUT the bit with her sisters and Tamlin going to Hybern would all still happen, Tamlin is good at creating delusions for himself and being able to save her from the obviously faked somehow mating bond would motivate him.


End file.
